Meat Pies! Success!

What to do when you are one guy with a vegetarian wife, who has managed to roast a sirloin and cook beer can chicken in the same week? Well besides from eating as much of them as humanly possible (which I did with some gusto) you make meat pies of course!

This was my first attempt at making a meat pie but the results were amazing - I'd say the best meat pies I've ever had. Because of length I'm going to separate this into two separate blogs: Meat Pies! Success! (the one you're reading now) and Pie Pastry 101. I'll let you figure out the contents of each.

First - the recipes. The chicken pot pie recipe I followed loosely was from Cooking for Engineers (man I love that site!). The steak pie I made came from the following recipe which I followed even MORE loosely.

Here are the main ingredients - nicely chopped and presented. I used my food processor to cut up a large batch of celery, carrots and onions (what a trio!). How much you ask? Whatever I had on hand and looked right. I'm only going to go into detail on the steak pie here as you should follow the Cooking For Engineers recipe for the chicken - it was amazing!










To the left is a picture of the main ingredients for the steak pie. I cubed the steak up pretty small so as to be a very manageable bite. I used Campbell's Beef Stock as I haven't had a chance to make my own yet, some Cremini mushrooms, and some freshly chopped parsley.

First I sweated the trio of veggies for 5-10 minutes. The beef was pre-cooked (I used a sirloin tip roast) so I just combined the mushrooms, parsley, beef, carrots, onions, and celery in a big mixing bowl and combined it well. When that was done I threw in about 2 -3 tsps of nutmeg, alone with some thyme, salt and pepper. Then I poured in somewhere between 4-6 tablespoons of beef broth and mixed well.


Then it was on to filling the pie shells. I bought the containers at Sobey's because: a) i thought they were a good size b) they seal nicely for the freezer

Here are the lovely pictures of the pies with the filling in:



















Here are the pies with the lids on. I brushed them with egg whites and put them in a 350 degree pre-heated oven for 1 hour.








Here is what they looked like when done. And trust me - they tasted even better. One complaint about the chicken - my had too much sauce but I think that was because I didn't have enough chicken in the first place.